The Biggest Announcement the Martyn-Lloyd Jones Trust Will Ever Make

April 11, 2012

18 Comments

Jonathan Catherwood:

This is probably the biggest announcement the MLJ Trust will ever make. Starting from tomorrow, April 12th, all 1,600 recorded sermons by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones will be available to download, at no cost, to anyone who wants to listen to them! There are no exceptions, so the Ephesians sermons, Romans sermons, etc. will all be available (it will take a few days to make sure that they are all included in the library). All one has to do is join the MLJ Library (membership is free of course) and start to download! Simply go to our newly updated site at http://www.mljtrust.org and click on “MLJ Library”.

This is a decision that the UK Board has been wrestling with for a long time, because by moving away from the sale of MP3 discs (and tapes before that), which has kept the Recordings Trust in existence for 30 years in God’s grace, they will become completely dependent (as we are in the United States MLJ Trust ministry), on the voluntary donations of brothers and sisters who feel called to support the ministry while downloading sermons.

In the end, however, and after much prayer and discussion, our brothers in the UK felt that as the world of low-cost distribution through the internet was now far reaching enough that most people around the world (even in developing countries) can gain access to this ministry through a computer, and as many other ministries have had a positive experience shifting to a voluntary donation approach to on-line sermons, they felt (as we do) that this change might be in accordance with God’s will.

While there is some nervousness about such a big change, it our our most earnest hope, on both sides of the Atlantic, that this announcement will help us to fulfill the objective that has fueled this ministry since its inception 30 years ago: To preserve, and make as widely available as possible, the doctrinal exposition of God’s word by the late Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a man who could never quite believe how God had used him for the benefit of the Gospel over his long ministry in the pulpit of Westminster Chapel.

This announcement eMail has been timed to coincide with our formal announcement at “Together for the Gospel”. This morning (Wednesday, April 11th), we will be making the announcement on stage to the approximately 7,000+ Christian leaders and teachers who will be attending, and we never forget that the participation of the MLJ Trust at this conference was made possible by the kind support of our subscribers.

Charging for sermons has seemed to me somewhat like the moneychangers in the Temple. Glad that some popular preachers and ministries are seeing the greater benefit of making their sermons available for no charge. Money in their coffers in comparison to the free spread of the Christian faith around the globe and across the years is…well…there’s no spread sheet for that.

While clearly people can and do do this, certainly when the MLJ trust starting making this stuff available a tape would have costs a fair bit to produce, and so charging for it would make sense to cover costs. As they say, now with digital and the overheads being so much lower they can offer it for free. Even then, they still have to trust that people will donate to cover the still large costs of turning these talks into MP3’s and the bandwidth and server space to host them all.

Have you registered yet? It’s free. Once you’ve registered you click on the “Audio Library” tab which has a picture of the opening vault. Then click on the “Enter the Library” tab. Pick a sermon, or on the right pick a Bible book on the right to see other sermons. When you find a sermon you want to download, just click on the “Download” tab below the title of that message. It should begin downloading onto your computer.